Category Archives: Visual Effects

My Toronto Twenty-Two Turbines posting has gotten a fair amount of response, including a number of suggestions of other locations where turbines might be installed. Always responsive to my readers, I’ve added some new turbines to the Toronto skyline. All of these pictures are clickable.

3 in High Park

Queen’s Park

Toronto City Hall, with Queen’s Park’s turbine in the background

Eaton Center, with City Hall’s turbine and even the 3 High Park turbines

Exhibition Place. Note the rather small wind turbine that was placed there several years ago, and which many Torontans think represents what is being installed out in the sticks.

That has a nice alliterative ring, doesn’t it? There’s a big discussion over at Ontario Wind Resistance about putting some wind turbines in Toronto and having the residents there do their part in fulfilling Ontario’s dreams about wind energy. In an effort to constructively add to that discussion, I’ve created a 3-D Google Earth KMZ file that shows 22 turbines placed in Toronto’s harbour.

Happy flying.

Update, 4/30/2012. Someone mentioned putting a turbine on the lawn at Queen’s Park, the seat of the Ontario government. Hey, your wish is my command, and there are more at a follow-up posting. All of these are clickable.

And here’s a picture of the new improved waterfront, with the QP turbine visible up University.

And while I’m at it, here’s the toy turbine compared with what is getting installed now, with even larger turbines soon to follow.

Hawaii’s legislature, based on Oahu, passed a law requiring that 40% of their oil-based electricity generation be replaced by renewables. Predictably, proposals for wind energy projects have cropped up. Also predictably, they’ve cropped up on the more remote islands, where the Honolulu folks can look at them from a distance and feel smug about their environmental bona fides. This should sound familiar. Continue reading Sacrilege on Moloka’i→

The most striking and immediate impression a visitor has to a wind farm is the overpowering visual effect of these large moving objects – it is almost impossible to see anything else. The word that comes to mind is “industrial”. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on the person, and perhaps their view of man’s place on the planet. Unfortunately, the visual effects sometimes include flicker from the blades and strobing from the shadows. While these effects don’t seem very disruptive to me, I’ve never experienced them and a fair number of people living close to developments do complain about them.

In order to provide some sense of the scale of modern turbines, I’ve created pictures showing a 1.5mw turbine (the 2.3’s have a proportionally larger blade) next to (for Canadians) the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, and (for Americans) the Statue of Liberty. The numbers along the side are in meters. Continue reading Visual Effects Summary→